Descriptive writing, or what many teachers like to call “show, don’t tell writing,” is a skill that needs to be practiced and modeled A LOT for students to truly master it. Check out one of my favorite lessons for modeling writing with a mentor text to help students be as descriptive as possible! This lesson is one of 18 in a blog hop, where we are sharing some great ideas and free downloads with you… plus giveaways, too!

Model Descriptive Writing With a Mentor Text

Sharing a mentor text full of descriptive language is going to help students understand how to truly “show” and not “just tell” when writing. Writers want readers to visualize. Yes, picture books provide illustrations, but most text requires our imagination!

This post contains Amazon affiliate links. It does not cost you anything extra to use these links, and Amazon pays me a few cents for your purchase which I put toward my mentor text giveaways.

One of my favorite books that models descriptive writing is I Need My Monster by Amanda Noll. It’s about a little boy who absolutely cannot sleep without his monster under his bed. When his monster decides to take a vacation, he interviews substitutes that, of course, don’t compare to HIS monster. It’s such a cute book to read around Halloween time, but you can read it ANY time of the year. It’s definitely not “Halloween-themed.” Not only is it an absolutely adorable book, it’s the perfect mentor text for SO MANY lessons, including show, don’t tell writing. If you don’t own the book, you can also check it out on Storyline Online, read aloud by Rita Moreno!

As you read the book to your students, stop and analyze the descriptive writing that the author uses. From his monster’s ragged breathing and uncut claws to his spooky green ooze, you will be able to discuss the descriptive language that helps the reader visualize on every page!

You could make a list on an anchor chart of all of the descriptions, or have students keep notes of what they hear. Having these examples is going to help them with their writing activity later. Having models handy doesn’t mean they’ll copy, it means they will have some good examples to help with their own thinking! 

Modeling Writing In a Mini-Lesson

You can get a free copy of the lesson I am going to describe in this post by entering your information below. It will be sent straight to your inbox!

Use the paragraph provided in the free download, or write your own descriptive paragraph to read to students about a monster. If you are writing your own, I suggest drawing a monster (don’t show it to them yet though!) and then writing your paragraph. Make sure to describe your monster MOSTLY well if you write your own, while also leaving out some very small details. (You’ll see why in the lesson.)

Read the paragraph about your monster a few times to the students, and have them draw what they hear and what they visualize based on your description.

Once students have had a few minutes to get their sketch as accurate as they can based on what you read to them, show them YOUR monster. Have a discussion about what is different in their picture than yours, but especially what is the same. Ask questions like, “What descriptions did I provide that helped you accurately draw your monster?” and “What could I have added to my writing to be more descriptive and specific so that your drawing would have looked more like mine?” (This is why you needed to leave out some very small details that would affect them being exactly the same.)

Below is a student’s drawing of my monster you see pictured for this lesson from my class a few years ago- pretty good, right? Notice the teeth are different- even though I was detailed, I didn’t specify that my teeth were “flat” so she drew them as sharp. I also didn’t mention that my monster’s tail was also green and warty.

Put It Into Practice

**This lesson can be done over the course of two or three days if needed for time constraints!**

Give students the opportunity to do exactly what you just modeled! Provide students paper to draw their own monster. If you have “privacy folders” or some other form of hiding work, use them! Students are going to write about their monsters and then read their paragraphs to a partner. Just as your students drew YOUR monster blindly, so will their partner, so you won’t want the students to see each other’s monsters.

Once students have drawn their monsters, direct students to label the parts of their monster that they believe to be important to include in their descriptive writing. Remind them that they will be reading their paragraph aloud to a partner for their partner to draw, so it should include as many specific details as possible.

Allow time for students to write a paragraph about their monsters using their labeled drawings. As you saw in my example, I wrote in first-person as if I was the monster because this is a great way to get students away from every sentence starting: “My monster has…” When I did this lesson with my students, I even left my paragraph projected up on the screen to give them ideas for their writing (because modeling is key!) – after all, it isn’t like they could copy mine since their monster was completely different.

Now for the fun! Have students pair up (or even get into small groups if you have more time) to read their paragraphs to each other. Once their partner has drawn the monster based on the descriptive paragraph, the student can reveal their real monster picture to see how well they match up!

Take It Further

As you can probably already imagine, this activity lends itself well to the revision process. Once both partners have read their paragraphs and drawn each other’s monsters, encourage them to have a discussion about what is different about the two monsters, just as you did with your own example. What details were missing that could have made the pictures more identical? Students could revise their writing to add those details in to make their paragraph even more descriptive!

Your students will really love the challenge of trying to get their partner to draw a monster exactly like theirs. This was a lesson that my students talked about for weeks after- so much so that I ended up doing it again with a turkey theme!

If you loved this lesson, you might be interested in getting the entire I Need My Monster Mentor Text Unit which also includes mentor sentences, practice with amazing adjectives and vivid verbs, quotations, drawing conclusions, vocabulary lessons and activities, as well as more writing prompts to be done from the point of view of the monsters in the book!

PURCHASE HERE!

LIMITED-TIME GIVEAWAY

I am giving away a copy of this book to one lucky winner! Enter below:

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PS – if you love this book, make sure to check out Amanda Noll’s sequels: Hey, That’s My Monster and How I Met My Monster. Your students will love all three!

Don’t forget to check out the other excellent mentor text lessons in this hop at the link-up below!

This post is dedicated to Jorge Calvillo Garcia. He was one of the 22 victims in the terrorist attack in El Paso on August 3, 2019. Jorge was at the WalMart to support his granddaughter’s soccer team’s fundraiser. As the gunman approached the soccer team, Jorge stepped between him and his granddaughter and her teammates. He lost his life protecting young children.

When I heard that the shooter was only 21 years old, I couldn’t help but wonder, had he been exposed to anti-racist lessons that modeled acceptance? Had he learned that the Latinx people, who he specifically targeted, were people with beautiful cultures and gifts?

You might read that phrase above, “anti-racist lessons” and think, well I don’t teach racist lessons! Of course not. But do you have dialogue with your students about race and other cultures? Do you expose students to races and cultures through literature and other media that represent children in your classroom, but also represent those who they might not have daily interactions? It is not enough to not be a racist. Silence on these important issues just might be exactly what allowed the hate of the Latinx people to fester in the shooter’s heart. Check out this article from EdWeek about ways we can teach important life lessons in our classroom.

We can no longer be silent.

This post is one of twenty-two that will share lessons, books, research, anecdotes, and helpful articles to guide you in your next steps. It’s time to talk racism, and we want to make sure you can do it well. Bookmark this link to visit all 22 posts this month.

The links to the book in this post are affiliate links. It doesn’t cost you anything extra, and Amazon shares a few pennies with me for sending you their way, which I put toward giveaways for my followers.

Using Mentor Texts

Mentor texts are the perfect tool to teach mini-lessons over several standards and skills across subjects, and also provide a way to teach the required content while representing races, cultures, family dynamics, and other differences that make diversity so beautiful. Read more about the importance of diverse mentor texts here.

A beautiful mentor text called Dreamers that was just published in 2018 by Yuyi Morales, a Mexican-American author, tells the story of what happened after she immigrated here with her two-month-old son and came upon the most wondrous place- the public library! She learned English and also discovered her love of story-telling through the beautiful picture books in this place of amor. It’s a reminder that we all have gifts and we take them with us wherever we go.

Dreamers Lesson Ideas

The word count of Dreamers by Yuyi Morales may make you think this book isn’t appropriate to read to upper grades, however, the words Yuyi uses are high-level vocabulary. Words like resplendent, immigrants, ancestors, suspicious, improbable, and resilience would make great context clue and reference skills lessons.

The art in the book is beautiful (make sure to point out to students that Yuyi wrote AND illustrated the book) and you could study each page for several minutes to learn even more about her life and what she feels is important. One thing that appears on every page is a monarch butterfly. Monarch butterflies are migratory insects, living in both Mexico and the United States. The butterfly is a great example of symbolism- connecting Yuyi and the monarch as Mexican-American migrants.

The themes of the book revolve around determination, resilience, and hope. Students can support these themes with evidence in the art and the words of the text. Yuyi arrived without English and learned to speak it, in spite of mistakes. The library became a place of hope for her, a home for her. She learned to read and also learned to have her own voice. It is where she figured out she loved stories and storytelling, and drove her to become an author.

Make sure to also read the author’s note at the end, where she shares about her life and the reason she wrote the book. This will lead to several opportunities for personal narrative writing, as students can reflect on their own dreams and gifts, and even places that are special and important to them.

You can download activities for the mentor text, Dreamers by Yuyi Morales for free here.

You can also read more ideas to go with the book from the author herself here.

Easing Discomfort

I hope that the ideas I’ve shared using this mentor text help ease any discomfort you may have about including anti-racist lessons in your classroom. Simple exposure and helping students connect to others as humans is a great first step. I know that sometimes we worry too much about saying the wrong thing, or not knowing how to answer a question that may arise, but silence is not the answer. It’s okay to not know. It’s okay to make mistakes and then share that growth with your students as you learn. We must take steps to do the right thing for the future of our world. You could be the one that makes the difference in a child’s heart. You could be the one that helps a student learn that differences are beautiful. You could be the one to plant the seed of acceptance.

Click here to read more about what happened in El Paso, and more about this special blogger event.

PIN FOR LATER

It’s not just a hashtag. It’s not just the latest buzzword. Incorporating diverse books into your lessons is important for so many reasons.

And it’s important for ALL classrooms… making sure to share books with black and brown characters, various family dynamics, and cultural differences aren’t JUST for the classrooms that have all of these unique qualities included in them.

Rudine Sims Bishop shared this about using diverse books:

Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of a larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.

Yes, we want students to have mirrors in books, where they can find themselves and be affirmed… but let’s not forget about the windows and doors- exposing students to new views of the world is important for students to learn acceptance and to be culturally aware.

The Day You Begin by Jacqueline Woodson is an excellent book to use to introduce the AWESOMENESS of the diversity in the classroom to your students! You can purchase the unit you see in this picture here.

Get a free mentor text unit!

I would love to share some ideas and ready-to-implement activities with you that can be done with mentor texts! Let me know what grade you teach below and I will send a mentor text unit right to your inbox for free!

Choosing Mentor Texts

As you are choosing those quality books that help students read like writers and write like readers, keep in mind the students in your own class for those mirrors, but also look for texts that will provide windows and doors for ALL students. Choose books that reflect the diversity of your community, but also other communities, too.

I am sharing some of my favorite books in this post using Amazon affiliate links. Using these links doesn’t cost you anything extra but I get a few cents for sending you their way, helping me fund book giveaways for teachers!

Are you choosing books that include people of different races and cultures? Do students know that some women wear hijabs, even if no one in their class or family does? Do students realize that some families live in apartments in the city, even if they live in a house in a neighborhood? Use a book like, Come On, Rain! by Karen Hesse to teach writer’s craft, figurative language, new vocabulary, and small moment stories, all while sharing about a little Black girl named Tessie and her mama waiting for the rain to begin in the hot city.

Or, here’s another mentor text with fantastic figurative language about a little girl who is determined to catch a chicken on her grandmother’s farm. For a kid growing up in the city or suburbs, The Chicken-Chasing Queen of Lamar County by Janice Harrington might be the first exposure they have to present-day life on a farm!

Are characters in the books participating in modern activities, or are they all based on historical events? Shaking Things Up is a collection of poems about past and present women who have made a difference in our world, like Angela Zhang – a modern-day Asian-American teenager who is working toward the cure for cancer!

Make sure that the only “diverse texts” you are sharing aren’t just about past events, or only shared during Black History Month or Women’s History Month. Of course, there is NOTHING wrong with reading books that share about times of segregation (for example) because students need to learn about this time and reflect on the similarities of discrimination that still occur today… but how are students seeing children of color TODAY in the texts you are choosing?

Those Shoes by Maribeth Boelts is a great example of a mentor text that ALL students can learn a lesson from while also featuring black and brown characters. The main character, Jeremy, lives with his grandmother in this story, revealing a family dynamic that some students may relate to or some may now understand exists. It’s a fabulous mentor text that can be used to model dialogue, teach point of view and perspective, and contains great vocabulary!

These book examples don’t even scratch the surface of all of the fabulous mentor texts that can be used to teach ELA and also provide mirrors, windows, and doors for your students. I have been more conscious of using books in my resources that will provide more inclusivity. Making sure students feel represented in culture, gender, race, religion, and family structures is so important. You can check out some of my units where I focused solely on celebrating diversity here.

I also use a variety of mentor texts in all of my resources, if you want to just shop around.

I’m always open to add more mentor texts to my list, so let me know if you have a favorite you’d like to see in a future unit!

Mentor texts are pieces of literature that are read (and re-read) in order to be understood, studied, and used as models. A good mentor text should serve many purposes.

My most favorite (and most suggested) types of mentor texts are picture books.

Why picture books?

Picture books are short and sweet. Generally, you can get through a picture book in one sitting. That means the students stay interested and engaged. Plus, the illustrations provide visual stimulation and can even help students with context.

BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY…

Picture books are the perfect texts to use to try out new reading strategies, connect readers to writers by identifying a variety of styles and crafts that authors use, AND use for imitation purposes in writing!

OH! AND BONUS!

Not only can you teach reading and writing standards using mentor texts, but you can also integrate other content (social studies, science, and even math), provide life lessons and teach social/emotional strategies, and allow multicultural literature (also what is known as ‘diverse books’) to be windows, doors, and mirrors to the world. We want students to not only be able to identify with characters in a book, but also be exposed to other cultures, views, and experiences that they may not know otherwise.

Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books. ~Rudine Sims Bishop

Picture books can be combined with poems, articles, and other media to help students display learning from a variety of sources.

Mentor texts can be combined to help students integrate content and construct their own writing pieces that display evidence of their learning.

Choosing Mentor Texts for Your Lessons

Integrate science and social studies content while also teaching reading strategies and writing techniques!

Along with picture books (fiction and nonfiction), some other examples of great mentor texts are articles, poems, short stories, and a chapter or section from novels. (An entire novel would essentially be made up of MANY mentor texts because remember, a mentor text should be shorter and easily re-read to apply multiple techniques and strategies.)

A mentor text should first be a book that YOU LIKE. If you don’t like the book, that emotion will certainly come through in your reading.

Choose texts that reflect the students in your classroom when possible, so that they can see themselves in the books you read.

Maximize your teaching time by choosing books that also relate to the content you are teaching in other subjects.

Planning With Mentor Texts

Since mentor texts can be used for multiple lessons, strategies, and subjects, it’s important to look at the book through different lenses. This means reading the book a few times with a different rhetorical pair of glasses each time.

Get the free guide to plan for your mini-lessons by clicking on the image above!

For me, the first time I read a mentor text, I allow a mentor sentence to hop off the pages at me. This is a sentence with amazing style, language, or a specific grammar skill that really stands out. This sentence can then be studied, analyzed, and imitated over the course of the week in order to help students carry that style or structure over into their writing. Visit this page for even more information about using mentor sentences in the classroom!

Mentor sentences can be found in great mentor texts! Use mentor sentences to help students apply better craft, style, and language to their own writing.

Next, I reflect on the story as a whole and re-read with “reading teacher glasses” on. Sometimes, there are specific standards you know you need to work on, so you may review the story with those in mind. Sometimes, a strategy or standard is very obvious; for instance, a book with a strong character would make for a good mentor text to teach character development.

Use a mentor text to analyze a character through their thoughts, words, and actions.

There are some skills that you can review with just about every book, such as inferring, summarizing, theme, point of view, to name a few.

*IMPORTANT* Just because a book can be used for many skills doesn’t mean you should cram them all in! Pick one or two per subject and dive deeper into those with each book over the course of a week or two rather than skimming the surface of several skills. 

Last, I hone in on the author’s craft, organization, and text type with my “writing teacher glasses” on. How is the book modeling good writing for students that they should practice and imitate? Did the author use a great introduction to grab your attention? Did she use a good bit of figurative language? Was the text a good example of a memoir? Additionally, does the topic of the text lead to a good writing prompt for students to respond, or write their own piece?

Mentor texts are great jumping-off-points for students to write their own stories similar to books.

Also, keep in mind the ways you can integrate media with mentor texts- present content in various ways through video, infographics, and songs, and allow students to identify what they are able to learn in these formats that they didn’t (or couldn’t) in the mentor text.

Utilize other media when you can with the mentor texts you use in the classroom to enable students to make connections and integrate information from a variety of sources.

Teaching With Mentor Texts

No matter what type of mentor text you are using, I encourage teachers to use their mentor texts in mini-lessons with their students. I prefer the “I Do, We Do, You Do” mini-lesson model, also called “gradual release” or “scaffolding.” It prevents a lesson from being a lecture and moves the responsibility from the teacher to the students.

Use the gradual release “I Do We Do You Do” mini-lesson structure with mentor texts to help students practice reading and writing strategies. You can get access to download the free guide by clicking on the image above.

When possible, I suggest reading the entire mentor text aloud for the “first read” without doing any stopping or modeling. Students will be able to enjoy the text as well as get a better grasp of the book without interruption. Then, simply refer back to a part or parts of the text that assist your lesson covering skills such as point of view or perspective, theme, character and setting, and so on.

Mentor texts can provide more than just opportunities to practice reading and writing techniques. Look for books that also lend themselves to help students be more empathetic and understanding of others’ experiences.

But of course, it isn’t always conducive to your lessons to read the entire book without stopping. Sometimes, it is beneficial to give students a task during the first read, or for you to do a think-aloud and model a skill during the first read. For example, maybe you want students to pay attention to figurative language used through the whole story, or perhaps you are modeling how to use context clues to determine the meaning of a word, or maybe your strategy requires you to do think-alouds to show synthesizing, or change over time. These would be times when you might have students take notes or when you work through an organizer together as you read.

“I DO”

During the “I Do” part of your lesson, you’ll want to model a strategy or technique by doing think-alouds and/or working through part of an organizer. Use consistent language to name the strategy or technique as you model for them.

“WE DO”

During the “We Do” part of your lesson, the students should work alongside you with prompts and clues from you. Allow them to do the thinking for you, but provide support and ask questions that help them understand their own processes.

“YOU DO”

Finally, the “You Do” time means students are practicing without assistance from you (except if you need to clarify some confusion). The students could work independently, or if the strategy is still new to them, I suggest partnering students or having them work in groups to discuss their thoughts.

Check out a collection of ways to use mentor texts and examples of lessons!

Link it back!

It’s always important to come back together whole group, even if all of the students were successful in the “You Do” time, in order to review the strategy one more time and help students make a plan for how they will use this in their own reading and writing. Application will not occur without guiding students to think about HOW they can do it… and yes, sometimes that means requiring them to do it as proof.

Checklists are a great way to help students remember the strategies and techniques you have taught them to use.

Check out the video below to see me model a mini-lesson using Ada Twist, Scientist as the mentor text!

You can get the lesson and activities I share in this video for free!

Need the book? Get the mentor text, Ada Twist, Scientist by Andrea Beaty!
(Amazon affiliate link, which doesn’t cost you anything extra and I get a couple pennies for suggesting it to you!)

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Transform Your Teaching!

I would love to help you incorporate mentor texts in your classroom! Download the free guide for mentor text mini-lessons now, and get this rolling in your own classroom!